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The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

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Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#911
post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FRED continues to amaze me with the kind of data they have availab.e

That's from Indeed. And, Indeed has fewer job postings overall [ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUS ]. Should we normalize the software jobs with the total number of Indeed postings? Is Indeed getting less popular or more popular over this time period? Data is complicated

This website has its own graph which looks different.

https://www.trueup.io/job-trend

I have never gone to Indeed to apply for a job.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#912
post #854
post #416

Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different way, because here's how I see it. If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in in…

Any boost of productivity in the coding part is quickly absorbed by other inefficiencies in the software-making process, unfortunately. AI also helps immensely in creating those other inefficiencies.

Intuitively I agree. In the long run, we’ll know better. But for now, nobody truly knows what the new equilibrium is.

That said: it’s one type of work that is getting dramatically cheaper. The debate is about the scope and quality of that labor, not whether it’s cheap or fast (it is). But if anything negative (errors, faults) compound, and the correction can NOT be done with the same tools, then you must still have humans triage errors. In my experience, bad code can already have negative value (it costs more to fix than rewrite).

In the medium term, the actual scope and ability for different tasks will remain unknown. It takes a lot of time to gather the experience to tell if something was a bad idea – just look at the graveyard of design patterns, languages and software practices. Many of them enjoyed the spotlight for a decade before the fallout hit.

Anyway, while the abilities are unknown, AI will be used everywhere for everything – which is only wise if it’s truly better at every general task – despite every available data about it shows vastly different ability in different domains/problem types. Many of those things will be both (a) worse than humans and (b) expensive to reverse, with compounding effects.

The funny thing is I have already seen enthusiasts basically acknowledging this but explaining that those compounding issues (think tech debt) is the right choice now because better AI will fix those issues in the future. To me, this feels like the early formations of religion (not metaphorically even). And I have a feeling that the goalpost moving from both sides will lead to an unfalsifiability deadlock in the debate.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#913
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think of skeptics who dismissed the exponential growth of covid19 cases due to their initial low numbers. Compare: "Whenever I think of skeptics dismissing completely novel and unprecedented outcomes occurring by mechanisms we can't clearly identify or prove (will) exist... I think of skeptics who dismissed an outcome that had literally hundreds of well-studied historical precedents using proven processes." You'r…

Yeah, for this analogy to work, we’d have to see AI causing a small but consistently doubling amount of lost jobs.

If that were happening right now, how would we know? COVID-19 cases were tracked imperfectly but pretty well; is there any equivalent for AI-related job losses?

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#914

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly you don’t have children!

Life pro tip: teach your children to do chores.

> Life pro tip: teach your children to do chores.

Before teaching your children to do chores: x hours per week for chores

After teaching your children to do chores: y hours per weeks to have annoying discussions with the child, and X hours per week cautioning the children to do the chores, and ensuring that your children do the chore properly. Here X > x.

Additional time for you: -((X-x)+y), where X>x and additionally y > 0.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#915
post #416

Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different way, because here's how I see it. If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in in…

I wonder if some of this output will take a while to be visible en masse. For example, I founded a SaaS company late last year which has been growing very quickly. We are track to pass $1M ARR before the company's first birthday. We are fully bootstrapped, 100% founder owned. There are 2 of us. And we feel confident we could keep up this pace of growth for quite a while without hiring or taking capital. (Of course, t…

This is exactly how it’s going down

Companies that needed to hire 10 people to grow, only need to hire 9 now

In less than 5 years that’s going to be 7 or 6 people

I’m doing more with 5 engineers than I was able to do with 15 just 10 years ago

Part of that is libraries etc have matured too but we’ve reached the point from a developer perspective that you don’t need to build new technologies, you just need to put what exists together in new ways

All the parts exist for any technology to be built, it’s about composition and distribution at this point

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#916
post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are we in 0.1 of GenAI ? It's been developed for nearly a decade now. And each successive model that has been released has done nothing to fundamentally change the use cases that the technology can be applied to i.e. those which are tolerant of a large percentage of incoherent mistakes. Which isn't all that many. So you can keep your 10x better and 100x cheaper models because they are of limited usefulness let al…

A decade? The explosion of funding, awareness etc only happened after gpt-3 launch

AlphaGo beating the top human player was in 2016. To my memory, that was one of the first public breakthroughs of the new era of machine learning.

Around 2010 when I was at university, a friend did their undergraduate thesis on neural networks. Among our cohort it was seen as a weird choice and a bit of a dead-end from the last AI winter.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most significant technology takes almost a generation to be fully adopted. I think it is unlikely we are seeing the full effect of LLM's at the moment. Content producers are blocking scrapers of their sites to prevent AI companies from using their content. I would not assume that AI is either inevitable or on a easy path to adoption. AI certainly isn't very useful if what it "knows" is out of date.

In 10 years with the same amount of money and time that's been pumped into AI, still a financial black hole, we had the entire broadband internet build out completed and the internet was responsible for adding a trillion dollars a year to the global economy.

If your point is that AI/LLMs aren’t as transformative as broadband internet, I don’t think anyone here is seriously making that claim, right?

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#918
post #416

Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different way, because here's how I see it. If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in in…

my favorite solow line "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

This eventually changed. Companies do figure out how to use tech, it just takes a while.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#919

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output?" No. The bottleneck isn't intellectual productivity. The bottleneck is a legion of other things; regulation, IP law, marketing, etc. The executive email writers and meeting attenders have a swarm of business considerations ricocheting around in their heads in eternal battle with each other. It takes a lot of supposedly brilliant thinking to safely monetize all…

>A little further on and it'll be writers, actors, etc. The tech is going to have to be absolutely flawless, otherwise the uncanny-valley nature of AI "actors" in a movie will be as annoying as when the audio and video aren't perfectly synced in a stream. At least that's how I see it..

It does not need to be flawless. It needs to be good enough to put butts in seats.

Re: The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

#920

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a smart question. In 1987 the economist Robert Solow said "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics". We should remark he said this long before the internet, web and mobile, so probably the remark needs an update. However, I think it cuts through the salesmen hype. Anytime we see these kinds of claims we should reply "show me the numbers". I'll wait until economists make thes…

> so probably the remark needs an update Only if you want to add "internet, web, and mobile" before "age". Otherwise it doesn't need any change. But that phrase is about the productivity statistics, not about computers or actual productivity.

You’re saying that the internet, web, and mobile haven’t improved productivity?
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